Dec 24, 1963: Top CIA official seeking to investigate Oswald is ‘sandbagged’ by his bosses

John Whitten is a rare hero of the JFK story. He was a senior CIA official who sought, behind the scenes, to conduct an honest investigation of what the agency knew about accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, before President Kennedy was killed.

But at a meeting on Christmas Eve 1963 deputy director CIA Richard Helms and counterintelligence chief Jim Angleton shut down Whitten’s efforts to investigate Oswald’s contacts among pro- and anti-Castro Cubans and relieved him of his responsibilities for investigating JFK’s assassination.

Whitten’s story, which I first reported in the Washington Monthly in 2003, illuminated the inner workings of the CIA in the days and weeks after JFK was killed. It is the story of a “good spy” whose pursuit of the truth about JFK’s death cost him his career.

Whitten’s ordeal in December 1963 was so sensitive it could only be recounted behind closed doors on Capitol Hill fifteen years later and would only become public knowledge twenty years after that. As the 50th anniversary of the JFK’s death approaches, Whitten’s story endures as a cautionary tale of how two top CIA officials prevented a real investigation of JFK’s asssassination.

Whitten told the story only twice, in 1976 and 1978; it is well-corroborated by other CIA records.

At a CIA staff meeting the day after President Kennedy was killed, Helms put Whitten in charge of reviewing all Agency files on Oswald. He was chief of the Mexico and Central America desk of the clandestine service, which meant he was familiar with all CIA operations in the region. Oswald had visited Mexico in October 1963 so his experience was relevant.

Whitten was also highly regarded as an investigator. He had pioneered the use of the polygraph at the Agency and built a track record of success in counterespionage investigations. A brilliant if overbearing man, he assembled a staff of thirty people and worked eighteen hours a day to read every report related to the assassination, no matter how ludicrous or trivial. Within two weeks, he had drafted a 23-page “Preliminary biographical study on Lee Harvey OSWALD.” He circulated it to various offices in the clandestine service asking for comment.

Angleton was annoyed by his efforts, Whitten said.

“In the early stage Mr. Angleton was not able to influence the course of the investigation, which was a source of great bitterness to him,” Whitten recounted to the Church Committee 13 years later. “He was extremely embittered that I was entrusted with the investigation and he wasn’t. Angleton then sandbagged me as quickly as he could.”

Whitten soon discovered he, like Mexico City station chief Win Scott, had been cut out of the loop on information about Oswald. His realization came on December 6, 1963 when the FBI informed the CIA that its initial report on Oswald was done and appropriate CIA officials were free to review it before its release on Dec. 9.

The Counterintelligence (CI) Staff, which had been watching Oswald since 1959, was also interested in the FBI’s findings, so Whitten went to the Justice Department accompanied by Birch O’Neal, the chief of a highly secretive office within the CI staff, called the Special Investigations Group. O’Neal’s office, known as CI/SIG/, had controlled access to Oswald’s CIA file ever since Oswald defected to the Soviet Union in October 1959.

As Whitten recalled in his secret sworn testimony:

“We went to Mr. Katzenbach’s office in the Department of Justice and read this very thick report, For the first time I learned a myriad of vital facts about Oswald’s background which apparently the FBI had known throughout the initial investigation and had not communicated to me. …Reading Katzenbach’s report for the first time I learned that the FBI was in possession of diary-like material which Oswald had had in his possession and was found after the assassination. I learned for the first time that Oswald was the man who had taken a pot shot at General Edwin Walker, two key facts in the entire case.”

In his diary Oswald wrote about his plans to confront the anti-Castro Cuban Student Directorate in New Orleans and provoke a fight with them. The FBI’s information was relevant to any understanding of Oswald, and no one had told Whitten, nominally the man in charge of the agency’s Oswald file review.

“None of this had been passed to us,” Whitten complained. He was specific about the information that had been denied to him:

“Oswald’s involvement with the pro-Castro movement in the United States was not at all surfaced to us [meaning him and his staff] in the first weeks of the investigation,” he said.

Whitten had never gotten the FBI reports on Oswald from Dallas and New Orleans. All he knew about Oswald’s encounters with the anti-Castro students came from the Washington Post, even though the group was funded by the CIA and run by a highly regarded officer named George Joannides.

Whitten continued to circulate his draft report, incorporating comments along the way. His probe came to an abrupt end two weeks later when he distributed a final draft of his report, now 61 pages long. He acknowledged its shortcomings. It was not, he noted, “a full appreciation of either the FBI report as such or of other material we hope to get from the FBI today.”

On Christmas Eve Helms called a meeting in his office to review Whitten’s draft, and invited Angleton to comment. Whitten gave a summary of what he remembered from the FBI report and said his report was “obviously useless” in light of the information it did not contain. He said more investigation was needed. He suggested that the Soviet Bloc offices of the clandestine service analyze the Soviet angles in Oswald’s diary. He also thought Oswald’s Cuban connections deserved more scrutiny. In retrospect, he said “the whole investigation” should have moved to Miami.

Angleton ignored Whitten’s suggestions and disparaged his work.

“This report has so many errors in it we can’t possibly send it over to the FBI,” he said.

Whitten protested that no one had ever envisioned sending the document to the Bureau. Angleton said the Oswald investigation should be turned over to the Counterintelligence Staff. Helms agreed on the spot. Whitten returned to his duties on the Mexico and Central American desk.

Whitten was relieved of his job, Helms explained, because “we could see that this investigation was broadening far beyond Mexico City and it did not make much sense to have it in the hands of a man who was running the Mexico City desk.”

That wasn’t true, at least not for the CIA. As J.C. King had told station chief Winston Scott, Mexico City was the only major overseas station reporting on the case.

“Helms wanted someone to conduct the investigation who was in bed with the FBI,” he said. “I was not and Angleton was. ”

Whitten mistrusted Angleton. He told the Church Committee that he once sought to help the Justice Department identify the Panamanian bank accounts of Las Vegas casino owners who were skimming the daily take. When he tried to get CIA approval to obtain the information, Angleton killed the proposal. Whitten complained to division chief J.C. King.

“Well, what do you expect?” asked King.

“Well, I didn’t expect that,” Whitten huffed.

“You know Angleton has these ties to the Mafia” King said, “and he is not going to do anything to jeopardize them.”

“I didn’t know that,” Whitten said.

“Yeah,” said King. “It had to do with Cuba.”

Thanks to Helms and Angleton, there would be no internal investigation of Oswald’s Cuban contacts. As an sometimes provocative leftist, Oswald had attracted close attention from some anti-Castro exiles. But on that subject, the independent-minded John Whitten could not be trusted.

“Helms wanted someone to conduct the investigation who was in bed with the FBI,” Whitten had said, and that someone was James Angleton. They had a mutually protective relationship. The nature and extent of the CIA’s contacts with Oswald before JFK was killed would be concealed from investigators and the public for the next thirty years.

After his Christmas Eve 1963 confrontation with Angleton and Helms, Whitten never received another promotion. In 1970 he retired and moved to Vienna where he became a professional singer.

In the late 1990s, his testimony about the abortive Oswald investigation was declassified by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). But the CIA insisted on keeping Whitten’s real name out of the public record (the pseudonym “John Scelso” was used).

Whitten died in a Pennsylvania nursing home in 2000, silenced by his former employer and unknown to his countrymen.

Marina’s story is farfetched. She told the Warren Commission her husband buried the rifle in the ground after taking the shot; and dug it up several weeks later. Which is absurd. If true, the weapon would have been rendered inoperable and would have needed professional restoration.

The bullet dug out of Walker’s wall was so mangled it couldn’t be identified or tied to any rifle.

Thanks for replying, Jonathan. I just question why Whitten, who seems to otherwise be blessed with healthy skepticism, would consider the Walker shot as “a key fact” in his secret testimony? Or did he later, considering the source, dismiss that as an unfounded allegation?

Photon,What is your credentialed source to prove that Marina did not know of General Edwin Walker? What is your proof that no one was translating national and/or local news stories for Marina? Can you prove that Ruth Paine was not keeping Marina informed of the politics of the day, given the Paines’ collective history?

Within days of the JFK acaricature icaturessination Gen. Walker himself gave an interview to a super right wing German periodical. He blames OSWALD as the very same person who had once attempted to assassinate Walker himself! (raise(s/d) questions like a)Timing (Walker never mentions LHO b4 Dallas) b) IF he really DID know c) HOW he came to know (could be Walker was opportunisticly piggybacking onto the media tsunami or as I believe- it demonstrated clearly, a black and white caricature of LHO as the Rabid Radical leftist..(Legend Building) By removing JFK (to elevate LBJ..?) LHOs ideology could seem not so left, but any attempt on WALKER (An outspoken Hero to the ULTRA RIGHT) was definitive..

There is a consistent pattern in the Lee Oswald story both when he was alive & after his murder of government investigations being stopped by higher echelon government officials. Add this case of John Whitten to RFK’s stopping a State Department investigation of Oswald before the assassination (Joan Mellen, ‘A Farewell to Justice’), the Katzenbach memo of 25 November 1963 and the missing Mexico City Oswald impersonation evidence makes it more apparent that Oswald’s mother was correct in her assessment that her son was a government operative. US Intel would have stuck to Lee Oswald like glue if they suspected he was a communist spy; not allow him the freedoms he exploited each step of his saga as if guided by an ‘invisible helping hand’. The question of how could the higher echelon of government know who Oswald was without investigating him is answered by ‘they knew who Lee Oswald was’. The hurdle was keeping that knowledge hidden from the public.

This Lee Oswald puzzle makes me wonder how many other Intel operatives have been sacrificed in history after their services were no longer needed.

That’s a ridiculous statement. Marguerite Oswald might’ve been crazy and said some crazy things but she had a closer relationship with Lee than any of his brothers or other family members. It may not have been a healthy relationship but it was a relationship none the less…

Those following this site can continue to simply let your comments go unchallenged and trust that new students will know to do their own research, or we can confront you with your own standards: Please provide credentialed sources to substantiate your belief that Marguerite did not know much of anything about Lee.

I think that sounds right. After all, how could Whitten not know about Oswald’s involvement in the pro-Castro activities, since it was in the newspaper? He needed the FBI to tell him what was in the news? What were all those CIA staffers doing?

I don’t doubt that Whitten was stonewalled, and that his bosses didn’t want him to get too deep, but it also sounds (based on the little reported here) that he wasn’t getting very far on his own. Like so much about this case, what is being told doesn’t add up.

Whitten is one of my favorite characters in the whole saga. During the HSCA hearings in the 70’s, he testified, in retirement as “John Scelsco.” He called the witholding of info on Cuba by Dulles unethical and said that the CIA’s William Harvey was capable of killing and “too young” to have “assassinated Garfield or McKinley”!Obviously a man of character and integrity, he resigned and sang professionally in Vienna rather than pursue his CIA career in an abbreviated form.

Bill Simpich wrote “State Secrets” and shows a pattern of obfuscation involving CI/SIG of which Whitten was part. I’m not certain if Angleton was worried or embittered because Helm’s placed Whitten in charge of the investigation; Helms and Angleton worked in tandem. If Angleton had ties to the mob(per J.C.King), as did Hoover, Johnson, Ruby, Ferrie and Bannister, and many others tied in to JFK’s assassination, it would seem logical that the mob, of necessity, sub-contracted the job to CIA trained anti-Castro Cubans assassins from the Dominican Republic. The whole Texas, Mafia, FBI/CIA, Anti-Castro Cuban, Defense Contracts/Military-Industrial nexus comes together in Dallas on 11-22-63, to expressly take down the regime of JFK.